This paper investigates the impact of new food safety regulations, a positive list system (PLS), on the vertical supply chain for bananas in Korea using monthly price data from January 2012 to February 2018. To analyze the impact of the PLS on imported, wholesale, and retail banana prices in Korea, this paper utilizes directed acyclic graphs, granger causality tests, and historical decomposition methods. We find that imported banana prices are caused by retail or wholesale banana prices in terms of predicted or contemporaneous causation. These findings suggest that banana wholesalers and retailers have market power over banana importers in terms of price leadership. The results of the historical decomposition show that the PLS shock has a positive effect (a non-tariff effect) on wholesale and retail banana prices. The size of the price shock is larger at the wholesale level compared to retail level, which implies the relatively a larger market power of wholesalers on retailer. Therefore, policymakers in Korea can use the PLS as a tool to protect domestic food market as well as a means of control on possible overuse of market power.

In this study, we investigate important decisional factors for the purchase intention of animal welfare labeled beef in Korea considering direct and indirect paths (trust and attitudes). Using a structural equation model with 300 samples from the Korea consumer panel survey, we find that perceived knowledge and revealed information positively affect consumer purchase intention for beef labeled as supporting animal welfare. Our results also show that a subjective norm (positive opinions of friends or family on animal welfare) has a positive effect on the purchase of beef labeled as “welfare conscious.” Based on our results, we can derive policy implications for expanding animal welfare raising practices to achieve sustainable development in the livestock sector without ethical and environmental side effects. Three possible policy alternatives include an online word-of-mouth strategy for improving subjective norms, enhancing animal welfare labeling information, and setting up public education for such labeling.

This paper proposes a novel application of the multinomial logit (MNL) model using Cropland Data Layer and field-level boundaries to estimate crop transition probabilities, which are used to generate forecast distributions of total acreage for five major crops produced in the state of Kentucky. These forecasts distributions have a wide range of applications that, besides providing interim acreage estimates ahead of the June Acreage Survey, can inform the ability of producers to incorporate new crops in the land-use rotation, investments in location-specific capital and input distribution as well informing the likelihood of adverse water quality events from nutrient run-off.